An expedition to free a brother sovereign from prison was undoubtedly a
generous and chivalrous undertaking. But the spirit and generosity would
not have been less, if the policy had been more profound and more
comprehensive,--that is, if it had taken in those considerations and
those persons by whom, and, in some measure, for whom, monarchy exists.
This would become a bottom for a system of solid and permanent policy,
and of operations conformable to that system.
The same fruitful error was the cause why nothing was done to impress
the people of France (so far as we can at all consider the inhabitants
of France as a people) with an idea that the government was ever to be
really French, or indeed anything else than the nominal government of a
monarch, a monarch absolute as over them, but whose sole support was to
arise from foreign potentates, and who was to be kept on his throne by
German forces,--in short, that the king of France was to be a viceroy to
the Emperor and the king of Prussia.
It was the first time that foreign powers, interfering in the concerns
of a nation divided into parties, have thought proper to thrust wholly
out of their councils, to postpone, to discountenance, to reject, and,
in a manner, to disgrace, the party whom those powers came to support.
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